Searching for a specific Robert Morris drawing on Google Images, I just came across this. It’s from the Walker Art Center in 1972. A Merce Cunningham performance with background designed by Robert Morris. Funny.

NICHOLAS KNIGHT: Declaimed

Luis Jacob, "Album II", 2004. Image montage in plastic laminate

First, some immediate differences between the projects of Jacob and Gander.  The Albums are artworks presented in galleries: they have a material presence with their laminated plastic, various photographic supports, and wall pins; and they are arranged in the space of the gallery such that a viewer engages the panels while “on the wing”.  He must walk one to the next, rhythmically pausing, enacting that conventional gait that characterizes the gallery-goer.  Gander’s work, on the other hand, is specifically for the magazine:  it has no other material embodiment; it is encountered sitting down (usually at a table, due to the unwieldy dimensions of Artforum).  These material and mode-of-engagement comparisons lay the groundwork for the more important issue, which is the presence and function of language in relation to the image.

Simply put, Jacob eliminates printed text from his work and Gander adds text to his.  Jacob’s images are found-objects.  They are circulating in the global-cultural matrix of various published sources.  Inevitably, images that pass through this system are accompanied by some sort of caption that tethers the visual component to an indexical reference.  (I do not use “indexical” here in the usual way it is applied to photography, in the sense of a direct imprint.  Instead, I mean it in relation, for example, to a search engine that indexes the textual content within a database.)  By excising the captions, Jacob creates a new matrix whose relationships must be completed by the viewer.  He insists that we must already have the wherewithal to assemble these “grammatical” elements into a functioning syntax.  But because photographic images are so inherently muliplicitous, so multivalent, one viewer’s act of re-assembly will never produce an understanding that maps unproblematically onto someone else’s, the artist’s included.

Ryan Gander, "A Torrent of Ideas on a Beautiful Day", November 2010 issue of Artforum

Into the space of this multivalence comes Gander’s project.  It takes the form of a 10-page spread in the magazine, with 67 images, each coupled with a caption penned by the artist.  Each is numbered and arranged on the page so that the narrative sequence is unmistakable.  The viewer is not invited to construct his own path through the thumbnail-like reproductions, nor is he expected to uncover the special syntax that governs the inclusion of any single image.  Gander’s source material is dizzyingly diverse, and it generates considerable pleasure following his leaps of insight that connect the images: a documentary photo of an existing work of his; a photo of a randomly observed moment; a piece of text, presented as an image; someone else’s photo, co-opted for his purposes; his daughter doing something; and so on.  For Gander, the border of the image constrains a space that is not otherwise delimited.  Anything picturable becomes a picture, and it does so primarily through the imposition of a language frame that gives it sense, that connects it to its surroundings.  At a certain point, one senses an inversion: the pictures have become support material for the captions.  The language-frame is the laboratory where the calculations are being performed.

I do not wish for the previous two paragraphs to suggest that Gander is beholden to written language and Jacob is not.  Quite the contrary.  It is my contention that the relationship of any image to the language that envelopes it is one of the most interesting and pressing issues for visual culture today.  Our fluency within a cultural space that is constantly iterating new and mutated forms depends on our ability to shift from the textual mode to the image mode, almost as if there is no distinction between them.  And perhaps, fundamentally, there is no hard-and-fast distinction.  These projects by Gander and Jacob point to two paths through the thicket of looking, reading, and the ownership of meaning.

“If I am to possess my own experience I cannot afford to cede it to my culture as that culture stands. I must find ways to insist upon it, if I find it unheard…

In claiming, however anxiously, agreement from you on the matter, I am not asking for permission to enter this claim. Who is in a position to grant or to deny me permission? The logic of the claim is that the claim is open to rebuke, perhaps from myself.”

Stanley Cavell, Philosophy The Day After Tomorrow (2005), p.82

Critical engagement with art and culture begins with an insistence on the possibility of one’s own experience. Yet the shape and content of that experience is constantly being washed over by “culture as it stands.” As defense against this washing-over (against being fully - and only - inside the culture), we must embrace our intuition that “something there, despite being fully open to the senses, has been missed” (Cavell, p.11). What is this missing something? Is it that which, though present in our perception, we deny, when we submit to the definitions and categories of our existing culture? Maybe, then, we bring back our experiences to ourselves, after all the obstacles that push them further away are—somehow—dissolved. And maybe giving them an external shape (of the sort that can be rebuked) is precisely what the act of bringing-back seeks to accomplish: a reach out of the voiceless isolation of not possessing one’s own experiences.

A specific experience at issue here is the intuition that formed for me, and which I was only able to name in fragments, during conversations with Sébastien Pluot, one of three curators of Double Bind at the Villa Arson, in Nice, France, in early 2010, on the subject of how certain works in that exhibition dealt with the central concept of translation. It was the halting and partial expression of this intuition that prompted Pluot to suggest that I make a text about it, so he could understand my claims. And after some effort, I realize that its purpose is the same for me.

Let’s begin with a work of mine in the exhibition, titled Text / Texte (2007 / 2010). This wall drawing combined a quotation from Henry James (“It is easier to read between the lines than to follow the text”) with one from Jacques Derrida (“There is nothing outside the text”) into a single large sentence diagram, intertwining the two claims, repeating each quote in both French and English along the way. This apparent argument was offered as a comment on the difficulty of positioning oneself at the right “distance” from an artwork, so as to grasp the full force of its claims. Just how “inside” any work does one have to be in order to “get it”? Or conversely, is the experience “more true” if we can get “outside” the work enough to get an accurate contextual picture of it? By setting this debate in motion, as if the debate itself were outside the game it describes, I aimed to allow the contradictions to flow back into my own work. And if the contradictions that the work activates infect the work itself, do they cancel the thing out? Then what becomes of the claims?

In order to address these questions, let’s shift gears for a moment with a brief foray into the history of mathematics. Around 1900, some mathematicians, in particular Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead, believed that number theory needed to be reconstituted on purely logical grounds, so that all of its claims would be analytically provable. With great effort and genius, they very nearly accomplished this. But the difficulties in doing it completely were profound, and in 1931, Kurt Gödel published a paper that proved the task was impossible, by using its very logic against it. The logical system could never be both complete and consistent: it could not contain the means for proving all the true statements available to the system.

It was in the course of working through these issues that mathematical logic gave us the idea of meta-languages: for any contained logical system, there are the statements that can be proven inside it, and there are the statements that are true, but are outside the system and cannot be proven. If you add those outside-statements to the inside-statements, you can produce a new language in which they are all true and provable, and you can make new claims about this expanded territory. Thus you’re using a meta-language to talk about the original language. What Gödel demonstrated was that once you’ve done that, there will still be new statements outside the meta-language that are true. To talk about that, you need a meta-meta-language. After adding those all together, you’ll need a meta-meta-meta-language…and so on, ad infinitum. There is no way to close the gates on language’s claims.

But what of art? My intuition to apply this narrative to a specific impulse in contemporary art (an impulse prevalent in Double Bind) emerges in the artistic method where the artwork contains reference to its own materiality, or pictorial technique, or historical precedents, or logic, or so on. This self-reference is a means by which the artwork reaches out to the viewer, and asks the viewer to offer in return a specific kind of critical engagement. I imagine this offering to be a form of empathy, a claim that says to the viewer, we have the capacity to expand the boundaries of this experience in a similar way, though the boundaries are not established in advance of our agreement on them. Using art to expand the possibilities of art depends on the analogy of the meta-language.

By way of examples from Double Bind, I initially offer three, in brief. First, Mel Bochner’s Language Is Not Transparent (1970). This declaration is written in white chalk on an opaque black background, directly on the wall. The content of the claim instructs us to be skeptical about the ability of language to deliver unmediated meaning. And if we construe “language” here to mean not just text but also the language of an artistic medium (such as the drippy black painting that forms the ground of the work, and the inherited meanings associated with such a mode of painting), then the claim of the work itself must, by its own logic, become something which is subject to doubt. By calling itself into question, it sets off a collapse of reliability, a vicious chain of circular references.

Second is Bas Jan Ader’s I’m Too Sad to Tell You (1971), in which the artist appears in a film, sobbing, and unable to form any words through his tears. As viewers, we are faced with a (finally humorous) confusion. This unnamed sad thing is hidden from us, yes, but not, after all, the titular claim that he won’t be able to tell us about it. So the opacity of the cause of his emotional state is, with a dark wit, overcome by his demonstrable ability to not do what he said he wouldn’t! This layering of understanding is the creation of a meta-language, in which we are forced to engage with the work as being about its own opacity. The crying and muteness are legible inside the space that is opened up by the fusion of the image and the textual claim of the work’s title.

Finally, Aurélien Mole’s An Abstract (ZFF Soundtrack) (2006). A blank vinyl record placed on a turntable collects dust onto its surface. As the dust accumulates in the grooves of the spinning record, it eventually becomes audible as static, creating a unique audio imprint of the exhibition. This work expands the space of the exhibition by taking the show (and the record player’s own presence in it) as the subject that is being encoded: rather than imagining the gallery as a passive container for artworks, the record, in principle, is determined by the physical conditions of the space. The exhibition becomes a depicted term inside the exhibition, and still the vessel outside it that contains those terms.

I offer the term “picturing-itself” as a shorthand for this artistic approach, and immediately I want to offer two further (axiomatic) ideas: (a) the viewer of an artwork is not a passive agent, blithely receiving meaning; (b) an artwork is a special type of communication. That is, it has content, even if that content is, for example, “nothing.” The fact of the artwork, then, is the presence of the quotation marks: the condition of art is the difference between nothing and “nothing”.

The critical engagement that I am arguing for, with the objective of “bringing-back,” begins with the process of joining together the nature of those quotation marks with the content contained inside them. The method of “picturing-itself” is a message from the artist that she has made the same effort already: she senses that her experience is not contained by the language of her medium, and so she depicts that medium within the work, to show her claim as being outside the existing language, as contesting that language. (Even as the results of her effort are themselves placed in another set of quotations marks! How do we as viewers then join those quotation marks to the content they contain?) This ability to detect the presence of the quotation marks is essential to making sense of our culture. We can read a given content, but within what next larger context is it positioned? We can see what the message says, but what else does it say? And finally, is there any position from which we can arrest this questioning?

[This is what is at stake for us as agents in a democratic society, however flawed that democracy and however imperfect the agents. The task of engagement becomes, if you’ll forgive me this indulgence, an ethical task. Art is fundamentally dependent on assertions of freedom, but freedom is quite distinct from abdication.]

So what have we gained from this foray into “reading” the artworks of Bochner, Ader, and Mole, rather than simply reading them? I return to Cavell, from the Foreword to his book of essays, Must We Mean What We Say? (1969):

“If I deny a distinction, it is the still fashionable distinction between philosophy and meta-philosophy, the philosophy of philosophy. The remarks I make about philosophy…are, where accurate and useful, nothing more or less than philosophical remarks, on a par with remarks I make about acknowledgement or about mistakes or about metaphor. I would regard this fact - that philosophy is one of its own normal topics - as in turn defining for the subject, for what I wish philosophy to do.”

I wish to claim that we can apply this principle to art as well as philosophy, which leaves us with the notion that a meta-artwork is, after all, really just an artwork. But the key in the Cavell passage is this phrase “where accurate and useful”. Don’t both of those qualifiers require some sort of judgment to determine their effectiveness? Accurate to what? Useful to whom? On what basis can we answer? It seems to me that if philosophical remarks fail these judgments, then they become trapped as meta-philosophy, and do not do the job of philosophy. By failing, we could say that they narrow the space of philosophy, rather than expand it.

Looking at Hewitt’s photographs is a fascinating encounter with the problem of reading.  They are, first of all, beautifully made.  Their beauty and tranquility is an invitation to linger.  This makes them very generous, without being cloying.  The compositions are generally centered and symmetrical, the images in sharp focus, the light clean.  They generate pleasure in the act of seeing.  This quality in the depicted subjects easily transfers to the photographic objects themselves.

Untitled (Geographic Delay), 2009. Digital c-print, 30.875 x 36.875 inches

From their slowness emerges a “problem of reading”: a gulf opens between the visual clarity of the image and the complex referentiality of the objects within it.  Even a superficial engagement with the work makes it obvious that the books, photographs, and common objects that Hewitt arranges in her photographs are all voices in a serious discourse.  They all seem to be talking to each other, in a tone that is focused and deliberate.  The “problem”, then, is how to integrate the visual “reading” and the content of the discussion taking place within the image:  how much can a viewer rely on inference and implication, and still claim a full understanding of the work?  How necessary is it to extract the specific literary and cultural references, re-assemble them, and gain fluency in their language?  And failing our ability to achieve this, to what extent are we to be indicted for seeing these citations as oblique? [*1]

This makes me want to walk my terminology back a bit.  The “problem” of reading feels more like a dilemma, and a productive one at that.  Hewitt’s work is multivalent, and positions its legibility like a prism: each angle of entry breaks the view into a different spectrum.  Hewitt is African-American, and much of the material that her work references is drawn from the literary and cultural record of the black experience in America.  Or, at least, that’s what I gather from much of the critical reception of her work, like Huey Copeland’s text in the February 2010 Artforum.  Copeland reconstructs a narrative from Hewitt’s images that, to this white male, is detailed to a degree that is far beyond my present visual ability to grasp.  But looking over the checklist and press release provided by the Kitchen, one finds just a brief description of the film installation in terms of a text about 1950’s Harlem, and a single reference to W.E.B. Du Bois’s theory of double consciousness.  So how available is the narrative intended to be?

And it is precisely in this space between the clarity of her imagery and the restraint of her intention that I locate the dilemma.  The highly structured compositions, the delicate balance of their constituent parts, the very specific way the work is presented in the gallery: these things all “say” a lot about the pictorial content of the photographs.  But in the absence of reading that content on its own terms, those formal qualities become the content.  Or perhaps one should say that the formal qualities perform their operations on a depicted content whose meanings are withheld.

But withheld by whom?  Hewitt?  That doesn’t seem right.  After all, there’s nothing actually private about these sources; they’re part of a public heritage; and they’re currency within a cultural community that stretches all across America.  It is no secret that the contemporary fine art world is no more racially integrated than society at large, and may be even less so.  The majority of Hewitt’s viewers are probably white.  And yet her engagement with race as a subject takes a form drastically different than, say, Kara Walker, or Ellen Gallagher.  I’ll risk oversimplification here, and suggest that both Walker and Gallagher take mass culture (read “white”) representations of black folks and give them back to the viewer as exaggerations, meant to expose the latent pathologies present in our collective racial attitudes.  I think the reference to Du Bois and double consciousness is pertinent here, seen within the idea of “positioning” the images.  One understanding of double consciousness, according to Du Bois, is that black folks’ self-awareness is always both as an individual and as how they’re perceived by others.  Hewitt’s work enacts a reversal of this split awareness.  Her source representations are African-American self-representations, given back to the viewer in a visual idiom that does not obviously elicit “blackness”.  That is, one might venture the claim that Walker and Gallagher exploit the shame the adheres to overt racist depictions, where Hewitt elides it.  And what is gained by this elision?  A new double consciousness:  one is not being shown that what he knows is wrong, but that there’s something he doesn’t know that is right.

The thinking and writing I’ve been doing on this site, especially as it regards photography, has generally been done as an analysis of the fundamental ways that artworks contain their meanings.  Artists who make an issue of this balance their pictorial content within an image that calls attention to its own techniques of depiction.  Hewitt is no exception to this, and were it not for the powerfully philosophical way she structures her images, I doubt I would try to write about her work. [*2]  But the specific nature of her content compels me to venture into a discursive space where my footing is much less sure; I admit to real anxiety treading onto racial grounds about which I am obviously so ignorant.  But the work also tells me that to be polite and gloss over the subject would be doing the most egregious sort of disservice:  “hidden in plain sight” would be no accomplishment here.

I want to make one brief, somewhat analogous mention in this context.  Zoe Crosher’s recent show at DCKT on the Bowery, “The Unraveling of Michelle duBois,” (that’s a funny connection!) had some of this dynamic in it.  The work was self-consciously and explicitly about the material and visual nature of photography “as such”, with ideas applicable to the evolving discourse about the medium.  And yet one could not, in good faith, separate the sophistication of that inquiry from the charged subject of a conflicted and imagined female identity.  I think this approach is necessary to understanding and appreciating Leslie Hewitt’s work.  In the end, the advanced pictorial strategies (which are fascinating to contemplate and are, on their own, generally the subject of this viewer’s interest) must be seen as a tool in pursuit of a broader and more fraught agenda.  May she continue to pursue with such aplomb.

Stylistically, Collier crafts these images with very clean, in focus, centralized spaces.  The color is clear and realistic, the light flat, the depth shallow.  All of these qualities point towards an “objective” approach to the content.  (Or, to be rather more “wink knowingly” about it, they “signify” objectivity.)  The consistent range of print size (around 40 x 60 inches, with some variation) and the same white frames further enforces the effect of neutralizing and cataloging the subjects in the photographs.

Anne Collier / Open Book #1 (Crepuscules), 2009 / c-print / 44 x 59 inches

And what of that content, and its alchemy with “pictorial strategies”?  There are two main actions at work, and they are closely related:  one is to hold the subjects at arm’s length, to force a conceptual, psychological, and emotional distance into the shallow visual space of the photo; and the other is to stake a claim to the found source material as being one’s own, to make it okay to invest personal attachment into visual elements already pressed ultra-thin by the twin forces of mass reproduction and cultural cliche.

[Non-trivially, maybe I have the order of those two actions reversed.  That strikes me as a question for each viewer to answer individually.]

The distancing strategies are more immediate (ironically) and need a closer look.  The “arm’s length” principle is a metaphor made flesh in the “Open Book” images like the one above.  Here we see two arms holding open a book to a spread that features a sunset photo on the right side.[*1]   The plunging space of the landscape, and its saturated color set against the overall pale tone of the photograph, gives the sunset some emotional force.   But the formal set up of the image is already working against it.  Right away we register the fact that Collier’s photograph is a picture of hands holding a book with a sunset image, and not exactly a sunset image itself.  This “not-exactly” is a barrier that protects Collier, and the viewer, from having to own up to the consequences of the re-pictured subject and its myriad cultural associations.  It’s an inoculation against the emptiness of kitsch and cliche.

These strategies and ambitions are well-deployed in this exhibition, but they are also widespread in photography today.  The switchback towards emotional desire in Collier’s work is what makes it stand out.

One can sense an unpleasant anxiety among younger photographers today, in which they see themselves as being forced to choose between honoring their urge to get out there and make meaningful pictures of their world, on the one hand, and respecting the realizations and principles of the post-everything media world that clearly circumscribes the professionalized domain of fine art.  Ugh, I hate to make it sound like that, but it seems true:  in the knowing, visually informed world of professional image viewers, who has the inclination to be seduced by a sunset photograph?  Well okay, one says, the sunset is SO cliche, it’s an obvious no-no; but once the thought process sets in, what subject can arrest its advance?  The image-qua-image gets swallowed up by professional impossibility.

But generally, people don’t become artists because they feel the passionate need to tell a story of professional detachment.  The original thirst for meaning is still present, and navigating their practice back in touch with it is a challenge.  I can’t speak at all to Anne Collier’s personal motivation or intentions; I don’t know her personally nor have I read anything about her on this point.  But the clarity within her images belies a tenuous network of hopeful possibilities that connect her subjects:  the open (and unblinking) eye, developing in the tray (or cut in half, a la Dali and Buñuel); the media depictions of women and their cameras, and the feminist reversal embodied there; Judy Garland, and her tragic superficiality; the highly constructed tableau of an album cover, and the way the music within can bear so much personal meaning.

The fact that this particular exhibition draws its images from a range of Collier’s types of images struck me at first as a shortcoming.  There is something dispersed about this selection.  But on further reflection this dispersal seems like a strength, because it hews more closely to the lived sense we have that meaning is assembled from constellations of incompletely accessed experiences.  Trace amounts, able to penetrate the layers of separation.  But with open eyes, they’re there, to be collated, bookmarked, and developed.

Chief among these unique possibilities are scale, placement, and material.  The gallery allows Ebner to enlarge and reduce the size of the prints; to hang them at conventional heights or scattered about the wall; and to mix objects and projections in among the framed prints.  The prints, sculptures, and projected images in the gallery are all black-and-white; the same is true of the contents of the book.  The sole exception across both projects is the book cover, with its bright yellow “sun” against a white ground.

Some Clouds, 2009, Chromogenic print, 31.68 x 44 inches

Ebner’s work is dense with historical, social, and political reference.  It simultaneously ruminates on the philosophical conditions that allow images to contain such meanings.  The leitmotif unifying the work is the moment of differentiation between world and thought: the moment when language cleaves the world into irreconcilable fragments.  Furthermore, she actively pursues her subject through the terrain, making claims as she goes.  So, a photograph of a her pegboard with the black diagonal “strike”, usually presented as space between words, is shown as an finished image.  But that proves to be not foundational enough, and we’re given an image of the empty pegboard: the field that makes a blank space possible, the set that contains the null set.

My thinking about these images keeps coming back to two concepts that I normally don’t associate closely: granularity and inter-textuality.  The pursuit of a foundational set of images that represent the division of the world into its constituent parts is the granularity.  But as each image is put forth as a proposition that its content is a single grain, that it is fine enough to reverse field and start putting the world back together again, that image is despoiled by an intrusion:  and insofar as the intrusion can be “made out,” that it can be identified and described as the presence of two things, it is because the intrusion can be “read”, that it already has a name, and that the cleavage the image had hoped to stave off has already take place.  This is the intertextuality of the image, an “always already” penetration of language’s analytical function into the pure empirical space of the mechanical photographic device.

That is some fairly dense stuff, but I hope to make one other important point about these images and works, by way of an example.  The illustrated image above, Some Clouds, shows a daytime sky, although it seems underexposed to give us more detail in the clouds.  But right in the center of the image is a tightly scribbled circle; moving up and to the left is a jagged scribbled form, and then another in the upper left corner, cropped.  Suddenly these marks turn into letter forms, and are recognizable as graffiti, even if their message is hidden from us.  But while the literary content may be “invisible language”, we are still forced to realize that this picture of the sky is either photographed through some heavy glass or is a reflection on another surface (my hunch).  In either case, what had seemed like a picture of nature turns into a picture of the intermingling of nature and our own unintelligible urge to inscribe language onto the world.  And if this conjunction of ideas is the real subject, and this conjunction is an object of thought rather than physical mass, then the photograph might properly be said to be “abstract.” [1]

Now a couple comments about the relationship between these ideas, the book, and the exhibition.  The book is beautifully designed and printed (with the participation of Dexter Sinister).  With its bounty of images and its textual notes in the back (mostly), my reading of Ebner’s broader goals leans more heavily on the book than the gallery.  But it is worth noting that Ebner’s foundational approach to her work rightly accounts for the means of presentation of it, and so the book is a delivery system for images and also a depiction of a book.  Each spread shows us eight numbered locations, moving across the top of both pages and then across the bottom of both pages; each pair of numbers corresponds to a double-page spread in yet another, hypothetical book.  The footnotes in the back then collate a broad cross-section of referential material into a polyglot’s guide to conceptual photography.  It’s intertextuality as a form of publishing poetry: the play of back-and-forth, both as an act of turning the pages and as a conceptual subterfuge, is wonderful.

The show at Wallspace depends less on actual text for its subterfuge, and more on the haptic experience of moving through the gallery.  Whereas the book flattens each image into an indexical entry in a numbered sequence, the exhibition makes full use of the work being all around you, jostling for your attention.  Large prints in a row, medium prints scattered on a wall intermingled with objects, small serial prints in linear arrangement, a dark room with a projection and a print of a shadowed wall (!)…the strategies amount to a “catalog” of approaches to getting the images off the page and into space.  The granularity of any single image is ultimately held up against the “neutral” container, and found to be always already impacted by a group of decisions that prevent any true singular condition to hold sway.  It’s a brilliantly integrated meditation on photography and images in our present moment.

Tauba Auerbach, “Here and Now / And Nowhere”  at Deitch

Lisa Oppenheim at Harris Lieberman

Sara Greenberger Rafferty, “Tears” at Rachel Uffner

Donelle Woolford, “Return” at Wallspace

Alejandro Cesarco, “Two Films” at Murray Guy

Sara Greenberger Rafferty, "Madeline", 2009, C-print mounted to plexiglas, 24 x 20 x 1/8 in, edition of 5

Although I have preferred, for the past two years, to write free-standing reviews of single gallery exhibitions, the mixture of offerings in New York at present suggests a more synthetic approach.  So, I’ve elected to discuss a cross-section of exhibitions, and a few thoughts on the axis about which they spin.

The first observation is that each of the six shows listed above is founded on a displacement:  its apparent subject and its material embodiment have a “fictional” relationship (things are not quite what they purport to be), and the proposal of each specific fiction emerges as the true subject.  This is pursued with different strategies, and those strategies position the rupture at different points in the experience of the work.

The most familiar among these is found at SUNDAY, in “Slow Photography”.  The paintings presented by the three artists here use photographic source material in the construction of the image.  All the works are, at heart, unproblematic photo-realism.  The “fiction” injected into the image by depending on a photo of the subject (an oceanside view, a hotel in Islamabad, a geyser) is so completely internalized by now that it’s hardly remarkable, except to note the irony that painting has turned to photography for legitimacy.  The saving grace here is Lauren Warner, whose paintings achieve a plasticity that exploits our visual recognition of the tropes of photo-realism:  by juxtaposing traditional depiction with the expertly airbrushed mist of the geysers, a punchy and exhilarating visual moment seizes these paintings.

Familiarity of a different sort is found at Tauba Auerbach’s exhibition at Deitch.  The theme joining the disparate bodies of work here is supposedly “liminality”, claiming that the works capture the state between forms.  An image of folded paper is writ large on canvas, but buried beneath a pattern of Ben-Day dots; analog TV static is photographed and printed at large-scale as an image in its own right:  things that “aren’t” are presented as if they “are”.  However, the exhibition is crippled by the obvious fact that these works have all been made better, recently, by other artists:  Cheyney Thompson’s flattened paper paintings from Kreps in 2006, or Heather Cook at Foxy Productions right now; the big organ pales in comparison to David Byrne’s from last year; the “action at a distance” sculpture is overwrought compared to Beth Campbell’s mobile at Kate Werble;  the language of co-opted scientific concepts is warmed over and generic; and so forth.  Auerbach’s work with typography is fun and inventive, but her work within traditional fine art idioms is significantly less so.

Lisa Oppenheim’s show at Harris Lieberman includes a group of black-and-white photographs produced by re-photographing plates out of an old art catalog.  It so happens that the artworks depicted on these plates have been lost.  By layering positive and negative versions of the same image, Oppenheim plays with a visual cancellation that mimics the historical loss of the object.  It is only by mis-registering these layers that a contrasty, shallow shadow of the image appears.  A double-projection film in the back gallery is composed of progressively-degrading xeroxes of images from the original trip to the moon:  literal distance is buried beneath the flawed replications of imprecise technology.  The “displacement” at play here is the illustration that the object behind photographic depiction is permanently fugitive, and that the melancholic loss suggested by this is, ultimately, exquisite and liberating.  Oppenheim is an artist engaged with very current ideas about the expanded field of photography; however, that some of her projects don’t quite transcend the literal descriptions of her tactics, or seem imbalanced by their dependence on a backstory, demonstrates the difficulty of being sufficiently thoughtful and visual at the same time.

This delicate dance is achieved with greater aplomb by Sara Greenberger Rafferty at Rachel Uffner.  Images of comedians have been printed on an inkjet printer; those prints physically manipulated by moisture; the resulting images re-photographed; and finally made as c-prints and framed.  The finished works bear a grotesque violence that forks down two paths, parallel and unlikely:  sophisticated thinking about the reception in the present of found, historical images, inflected by the physical urge to make them understandable within the contours of the present, but ultimately returned to the safety of a pristine printed surface; followed then by a sociological reading into the depictions of comics and their props, bearing in mind the violence to social order that good comedy always trades in.  These layers cohere in the works with striking efficiency.  And yet the directness that is so palpable in comedy is held at a distance in these photos: how do we account for the emotional punch and the clinical gaze simultaneously, either in comedy or art?

The greatest displacement, and most fictional fiction, is Donelle Woolford at Wallspace.  One gets the feeling, while looking at the quasi-Cubist wood-scrap assemblages, that despite their appealing material and visual presence, these works in themselves are not operating on the same conceptual precipice that Wallspace usually offers.  They’re nice enough, but something’s afoot.  That “something” is eventually teased out into the open with a little research, and a query:  if biography and identity inevitably alter one’s reception of an art object, why not just invent the biography in order to generate a desired effect?  Woolford, African-American female, seems “allowed” to engage with Cubism from a certain post-colonial angle.  The story of her growth as an artist and her intellectual history seemingly confers validity on such a project.  But when we realize that Woolford doesn’t exist–at least in the conventional sense!–the shortcuts we took in granting her permission for certain investigations blow up in our face.  The trail of deceptions (and Cubist references) points back to Picasso’s famous dictum about art being a lie that reveals the truth.  But, like a chain of chemical reactions, what truth will halt the collapse of each subsequent, underlying premise that art, in some way, “contains” meaning?

If the Woolford show goes to the greatest lengths to locate its animating fiction outside the work itself, Alejandro Cesarco’s two films at Murray Guy go just as far to articulate these themes within the work, as its own explicit subject.  Each film is a somber meditation on the difficulty of accurately constructing, and faithfully communicating, the details of subjective experience into legible history.  In the film made with his grandfather, a Holocaust survivor, a text describing the challenge of balancing testimony against the historical record is voiced by the elderly man; that the text was written by Cesarco for the occasion sends the claims spiraling into a nebulous place that seems both tragic and necessary.  The other film in the show, elegaic in its delivery of five sequences connected to youthful passions, has as its centerpiece a monologue about the nature of literary tragedy.  It is the only text in either film which is actually spoken by the actor on-screen, rather than voiced-over.  When the actor delivers the claim that tragedy is the enactment of a fatally flawed interpretation (due to the indecipherable quality of a message passing between characters on incommensurable epistemic grounds), then perhaps we’ve arrived at a moment that states as directly as possible what all this displacement has been about all along.

The “tragedy” then (considering tragedy as a literary construct) is that all the claims coursing through contemporary art at this moment end up as cloistered hermeneutics.  The proliferation of intentional displacements– as a consequence of strategic distancing — reflects that these slippages have been deeply internalized by artists and audiences alike.  The fact of this displacement is already integrated into the fabric of our engagement with art, a situation made clear by the observation that the act of deploying these strategies is no longer enough to signify an adequately acute awareness as an artist.  It can be done well, and less well.  The stakes, for artist and audience alike, are whether art’s fictions can be re-assembled, its distances elided, first for the individual and then into consensus, and whether the violent passage from first-person to third-person will reward the risk and leave us in touch with the continually displacing present.

Taking Pictures
Nicholas Knight
September 11 - Oct 10, 2009
Opening Reception Friday,
September 11, 6-8 pm

In Taking Pictures, Nicholas Knight haunts the galleries of art museums, photographing people in the act of taking pictures. Like an anthropologist in the bush, Knight captures the peculiar comportment of the museum-goer, and finds that directly looking at an artwork is often replaced by the need to see the thing through the camera’s screen.

His own pictures of pictures of pictures create a breathless daisy chain of picture-taking that finds its endgame in a crepuscular video Gotterdammerung, in which the artist is seen hand-cranking a slide projector show of his own picture-taking. It’s picture-in-picture as a repeating decimal.

Like the painter of yore establishing his frame with outstretched thumb, Knight uses people’s hands-holding-cameras to organize the compositions in this series. Sometimes the back of the photographer’s head is seen. But it is the hands that grab your attention, as though they were trying to message something beyond the functionality of their gesture. They recall John Baldessari’s finger-pointing photos of the early 1970s and Wallace Berman’s mystical verifaxes of the 1960s, in which hands hold radios with mysterious images inside of them.

Michael Kimmelman’s recent lamentation in the New York Times that tourists speed through museums, stopping only to take pictures, is rooted in the conventional wisdom that the original is preferable to the reproduction, and belies a pastoral distinction that a thing experienced through the five senses is more real than one mediated by technology. Knight’s moral compass doesn’t point in that direction. His photos luxuriate in the details of the new world of appropriation: the twinkling lights of the camera’s viewfinder, the simultaneity of the image and its reproduction, and the digitization and miniaturization of the masterpiece.

For art historical purposes, Knight’s photos are the punctum in the story written by the Pictures Generation, in which artists like Sherrie Levine came to prominence by rephotographing original works by other people. Taking Pictures documents how the public has bought into the new authority those artists conveyed on the reproduction, personalizing the democratizing process. What photographer Louise Lawler did for art in the back rooms of auction houses, the public is now doing for art in the public realm, and we can all watch it on Flickr.

The most compelling art in these photos, however, is not the one on the camera’s screen but the tableau created by Knight. In staging this duel over representation of the object, Knight has created photos whose bipolar dynamic entertains to the extent that it destabilizes. And while these photos, just like the reproductions within them, are almost clones of each other, the compositions that emerge and the particularities of the subjects are distinctly original and, ironically, reward a close reading. One set of female hands with a Goth manicure snaps a jpeg of a monstrous de Kooning female. In another, a bald male head with biker jacket and silver skull ring hones in on Jean Baptise Carpeaux’s marble grouping Ugolino and His Sons. And in a miracle of metaphorical self-reference, the light from a Dan Flavin fluorescent tube sculpture illuminates Knight’s camera, as the Flavin itself alights on the subject’s screen, with a glow part Heaven, part Westinghouse.

Steven Wolf Fine Arts